V 02 - Domino Men, The by Barnes-Jonathan Page B

go.”  He pushed me forward and I stumbled into the pod.
    To my amazement, I seemed to pass through the ranks of tourists as though they were no more substantial than mist — will-’o-the-wisps clutching souvenirs, digital cameras and laminated maps of the city.
    Jasper stepped smartly in behind me.  “Smoke and mirrors…,” he murmured, in the kind of tone you might adopt trying to soothe a child woken in the night by bad dreams.
    Inside, it was darker and larger than I had expected.  Dimly, I heard the door hiss shut and the pod begin its smooth ascent.  There was a smell in there which seemed tuggingly familiar, redolent of floating bandages and verrucas.  It took me a moment to pinpoint.  It was chlorine — the smell of a public swimming pool.
    Our view of London was obscured by what appeared to be a large tank of water which took up almost half of the pod, as though we had somehow entered an aquarium by mistake.  Through it, I could see the landmarks of the city, distended and made strange by refraction — St. Paul’s elongated and obscene, the Houses of Parliament shimmering and fragile, the spires of Canary Wharf stretched out and distorted, its citadels of commerce glimpsed as though through the bottom of a clouded glass.
    More disconcertingly even than this was what floated in the tank.  It was a man, evidently at the extremity of old age, his skin wrinkled and puckered, wattled, creased and liver-spotted.  He was naked save for a pair of faded orange swimming trunks and seemed to be floating underwater, his ancient body, backlit by the sun, bathed in a halo of yellow light.
    I wondered how he could possibly breathe inside that tank, before dismissing the notion that he could actually be alive as absurd.
    Then, impossible though I knew it had to be, the old man spoke.  His lips moved underwater yet I heard him as clearly as if he were standing beside me.  His was a deep, old, sad voice, full of strange inflections.
    “Welcome, Henry Lamb!” he said — and he said it warmly, as though he knew me, like we went back years together, he and I.  “My name is Dedlock.  This is the Directorate.  And you’ve just been conscripted.”

 
     
     
Chapter 7

     
    “At the Directorate, we don’t deal in volunteers.”  The man called Dedlock was grinning at me, bobbing up and down with a grisly vigor which belied his age.  “You’re one of us now.”
    I opened my mouth to say something but not a single word would come.  Instead, I found myself staring at the old man’s torso, fascinated by a progression of creases that seemed to strafe his skin, flaps of flesh which throbbed and pulsated as though with independent life.
    Gills?
    Surely this man couldn’t have gills?
    Dedlock was glaring.  “You find us in the midst of war.  And I’m rather afraid we’re losing.”
    For several minutes my mouth had been too dry to speak.  Now, at last, I squeezed out a sentence.  “War?  Who’s at war?”
    The old man dealt the side of the tank a ferocious blow.  Jasper and I flinched backward and I wondered what would happen if the glass were to shatter and the water gush out, whether Dedlock would flail and flop on the ground like a beached carp.  “Secret civil war has been waged in this country for half a dozen generations.  This organization is all that stands between the British people and their oblivion.”
    I felt concussed.  “I don’t understand.”
    “Comprehension is unnecessary.  From now on you simply have to follow orders.  Is that understood?”
    I vaguely remember nodding.
    “Tell no one what you’ve seen here.  There are less than two dozen men alive who know the true purpose of the Directorate.”
    I managed an objection.  “What happens if I say no.”
    “To you?  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  To your good mother, on the other hand…  To your pulchritudinous landlady…”  He seemed to soften slightly.  “You’ll find your salary many times in excess of